Buzz Kill

An app helps moderate our caffeine intake

Oh, Coffee + Food's flat white, how we love you for a quick pick-me-up. But lately, we?re thinking we might need to break up--you?re making us jittery and it?s getting harder to close our eyes at night.

You see, beloved beverage, we?re using Up Coffee, the free new app that tracks caffeine consumption and sleep patterns.

To begin, you enter your gender, height, weight and target bedtime. Then, throughout the day, you click icons representing what you drink, from a generic cup of coffee (150 mg of caffeine) to a tall Starbucks Macchiato (75 mg) to a 12-ounce Diet Coke (45 mg). Even dark chocolate (24 mg) and Excedrin tablets (65 mg) can be recorded.

The app includes helpful factoids, like that most people can fall asleep with 100 mg of caffeine in their system. And that one?s important, since Up Coffee keeps track of how much of the stimulant you?ve consumed and metabolized, so you can adjust your intake to better chillax.

After a week?s monitoring, we realized that seemingly minor indulgences, like a 4 p.m. grande Americano at the Coffee Bean (225 mg), were getting in the way of solid shut-eye. So maybe we?ll just see less of you, beloved coffee--no need to make a clean break.